4. The Get Down, 2016
The list of film-makers qualified to chronicle the origins of hip hop in Seventies New York is not especially long to begin with. It certainly doesn’t include New South Wales uber-luvvy Baz Luhrmann, whose movies are chocolate boxes with too much sugar sprinkled through.
Netflix initially met Lurid Luhrmann halfway by signing off on a none-to-shabby budget of $7.5 million per episode. But this was insufficient for Luhrmann, who racked up $120 million delivering the first, and as it transpired only, season in 2016, which broke the streamer’s record for its most expensive show ever.
By then the production had been beset by off-screen chaos, including frequent blood baths in the writers’ room. The Get Down was released in two chunks, with Luhrmann continuing to toil on the back half right up to deadline. And all for naught: instead of a rapper’s delight he’d thrown together an indulgent nightmare.
“Relative to what you spent, are people watching it? That is pretty traditional,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos later said of The Get Down. “When I say that, a big expensive show for a huge audience is great. A big, expensive show for a tiny audience is hard even in our model to make that work very long.”
5. Gypsy, 2017
Netflix had moved on from its “commission everything in sight” stage and was doing the unthinkable and cancelling shows en masse. An early casualty was a stifling Naomi Watts vehicle created by first time show-runner Lisa Rubin, with a pilot directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson.
Watts was paid $275,000 per episode to portray a psychologist “who secretly infiltrates the private lives of her patients” while Billy Crudup was her sad-sack executive husband.
Quite how much Netflix poured into Gypsy is a mystery to this day. But in view of Watts’s salary and the hiring of Stevie Nicks to re-record her Fleetwood Mac classic, Gypsy, as theme tune, it is safe to assume the budget was not modest.
“We’ve canceled very few shows,” Netflix founder Reed Hastings told CNN as Gypsy received the chop. “I’m always pushing the content team: “We have to take more risk, you have to try more crazy things. Because we should have a higher cancel rate overall.””
